It's either lazy or victorious

“Here’s what populism is not,” Hightower told my colleague Bill Moyers. “It is not just an incoherent outburst of anger. And certainly it is not anger that is funded and organized by corporate front groups, as the initial tea party effort — though there is legitimate anger within it, in terms of the people who are there.

“What populism is at its essence is just a determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government.”

“So you can’t say, ‘Let’s get rid of government.’ You need to be saying, ‘Let’s take over government.’”

The answer is X

Edward Harrison:

Of course the US deficits are too large. Come on: 10% deficits as far as the eye can see are unsustainable over the long-term. The key word, however, is long-term.

No one seems to understand the difference between short-term and long-term and the debate has become an ideological free-for-all.

Anyway, the point is that the US economy will not be able to sustain recovery for long without stimulus. The likely result of withdrawing stimulus is a recession that is deeper than the last one, a major depression.

He seeks to explain:

Policy is exogenous and deficits are endogenous.

What that essentially means is that when I think about government, I view it with suspicion and my inclination is to seek to limit its size and scope. That means I have an innate disaffection for big government, deficit spending, money printing, etc. – but not in an ideological way.  It all depends on the circumstances.

HA! You knew that.

Conditioned to ache

via James Kwak:

“You’ve criticized the government for withdrawing from the economic and particularly financial sphere and allowing private sector actors to do whatever they wanted. Do you think the government should simply act so as to correct the imperfections in free markets? Or do you see a positive role for government in determining what kind of an economy we should have?”

In a world of want

“College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar.” [link]

It's ours. We fix it.

The session started off with a film from John De Graaf called, “What’s the Economy for Anyways?” which examined American society under the conclusions of Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service who defined the economy as, “The greatest good for the greatest number over the long run.”

Using that metric, the US economy has done a terrible job since 1970.

The US leads the world in GDP but its citizens suffer on nearly every major health and quality of life metric.

The key point here is breaking down the GDP myth.

If not honor, what?

Sarah Brown Wessling:

In front of us all is the collective responsibility to create hope and opportunity for every child in this country.

Inevitable and simple crimes

Matt Taibbi on how greed-is-good conquered America and the simply inevitable folly of brigands:

Even if he stands to make a buck, your average used-car salesman won’t sell some working father a car with wobbly brakes then buy life insurance policies on that customer and his kids.

As  Ayn Rand and Greenspan and foolish minions from Reagan to Bush put it:  ‘How To Buy A Car Without Rules’.

Road to Serfdom

The Wonderful World of American Fraud:

You distract the dumbshits with free-market B.S. because hey, for whatever reason, that’s what the public likes to hear, it doesn’t really matter what lie you feed them so long as it’s the lie that puts them in a trance.

And then behind the scenes, you do the very opposite: You fix the game, you cover up this problem here with those funds there, you move shit around, you skim budgets and you subsidize the system, you cover up the bad shit and once in a while throw a has-been to the wolves to keep the public entertained—that’s the way the system works, and anyone who’s an adult understands that.

We will dare quit purpose?

We advance industry, science, technology, but we are dumb about ourselves.

One man noticed we have not fixed our social institutions since our last effort in the 1770s thus we argue its accuracy.

Americans in general do not have the habits of deference, so the conservative in America does not have them either.

Ultimately he does not defer even to his country’s institutions.

Sociopaths took our rules

Blood is today’s gold. This world clamors for wealth and wealth is war.

I never knew what I could do until I let my dreams come through
but don’t think for one minute I expected to grow up in a land of lies;
blood instead of good.